10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Microsoft

Microsoft is a behemoth and the undisputed ruler of the computer industry. The company has been in business since the mid-70s and they have only gotten better. Sure, there have been some fiascos like the windows mobile, but some flop stories are bound to exist when you have a history as big as that of Microsoft.

The company has been synonymous with the word operating system as many of us had our first computer powered by Microsoft’s Windows OS.

Here are a few facts you might not know about the company that revolutionized the computer industry and the man behind it.

Bill Gates wanted to call the first version of the OS Interface Manager. I wonder if the computer world might be the same if Gates had succeeded in his plan. Anyway, thanks to the guys who went with the name Windows instead. The OS was called Windows because the box shape of PCs reminded the guys of windows. The initial version was called Windows 1.0.

Microsoft holds more than 10,000 patents and is one of the top five patent holders in the US.

Bill Gates coded the class scheduling program for his high school. He wrote the code in such a way that he was allotted those classes in which the number of female students was more than the number of male students.

According to statistics, more than 1 billion people use Windows and MS Office every day. Microsoft outlook has more than 400 million active users and around 3 billion minutes of Skype calls are made every day.

Bill Gates became the youngest billionaire at the age of 31.

Microsoft had a phone and a tablet year before Apple but that only contributed to one more story to the biggest blunders in history. The tablet had a touchscreen with a stylus and a keyboard.

Microsoft Office was first made available for Macintosh. Mac had it in 1989 while Windows got it the next year.

In the early days, Microsoft was written as Micro-Soft. The hyphen was deleted in 1976.

Rumer has it that Bill Gates helped Apple survive. Back in the 1990s when Jobs was not a part of the company, it faced a dark time. In fact, it was so bad that the company was close to bankruptcy. When Jobs was re-appointed as the CEO, Gates promised to invest $150 million in Apple.